Are You Laughing With Us or at Us?

Gender

Heavenly Bodies Ball, 2024. JOHNSON TEMILOLUWA / QUEER CITY MEDIA.

THE MINISTRY OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY

Are You Laughing With Us or at Us?

When I think of the growing trend of social media skits featuring male comedians who dress up as women, I think especially of the dehumanization of women and everyone who lives outside the rigid ends of the gender spectrum. Should a line be drawn on these performances? Or should we be increasingly unsettled?
Gender

Heavenly Bodies Ball, 2024. JOHNSON TEMILOLUWA / QUEER CITY MEDIA.

THE MINISTRY OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY

Are You Laughing With Us or at Us?

When I think of the growing trend of social media skits featuring male comedians who dress up as women, I think especially of the dehumanization of women and everyone who lives outside the rigid ends of the gender spectrum. Should a line be drawn on these performances? Or should we be increasingly unsettled?

lot of my childhood days were spent trying to understand what I was, how I fit or did not within gendered narratives. Gender never felt tangible. I could not point and name what it was that troubled me—that made me feel less masculine. At the young age of seven, what I came to know of myself were the images projected onto me. I believed that I was feminine because people pointed it out in me; but at that young age, I couldn’t see how my mannerisms differed from other boys. I vaguely remember going home from school after being called a boy-girl and asking my mother how a boy behaves or, rather, if I behaved like a girl. While I cannot recollect her words, I have learned to imagine her response to be something like, Oh! It is just a phase. You will grow out of it. I doubt she said those words, but they sound like something my mother would say. And for so long it anchored my hope that I would not always be quizzed about my mannerisms 

THE WEIGHT OF PERCEPTION

My identity then was a tabula rasa, filled with the inscriptions of what other people said I was—a boy-girl, a girl, a boy that behaves like a girl, and in extreme cases, a hermaphrodite. At seven, to put it simply, I was just me. I did not know how a boy behaved like a girl. I could not even see how my mannerisms eluded that of boys my age and were tilting towards the female gender. Often, I would walk home from school with my sister and her classmates, and in my usual jovial manner, I would run ahead of them or walk secluded, only to hear her classmate quiz, ‘Ugochukwu, why are you walking like a girl?’ I was always puzzled by that; I could not see what they presumed to see. After being laughed at on a football field in my hometown for similar inquisitions, I ran home, placed a full-length mirror in the garage, and walked back and forth, so that I could catch a glimpse of that oddity in me. And yet, I still could not see the femininity people perceived in my steps. There are so many memories like this. However, the crux of my early childhood was not finding someone like me; someone I could look at and see what people claimed to see in me.  

I didn’t get to meet or know anyone who was effeminate until I got into secondary school. The bond we shared over our collective societal struggles became a driving force toward understanding myself and attempting to love me as I was. Prior to that, the first time I saw an effeminate man was on TV, and although I no longer recall the name or details of the show, it was clear that his femininity was something to be joked about: an embodiment of comedy. When he showed up, his gestures were theatrical and exaggerated, his wrist perpetually limp, and his voice high-pitched, dragging out every syllable in a shrill, almost singsong tone. At that early age, I was intrigued by his existence and yearned to watch his scene when he was off the screen, as I had never encountered effeminacy on TV, let alone portrayed loudly. But, despite the representation, I felt an underlying sense of shame both for myself and the character. It felt as if my own femininity was staring right at my face, and anyone who was watching the show with me could have a point of reference. I would cling to the remote so that I could quickly change the channel when someone walked into the living room. Scenes with the character reminded me of my own experiences, having other kids my age chuckle when they saw me or when I walked into a room. At fifteen, I would watch the Ghanaian-Nigerian film, House of Gold, and feel the same way about the effeminate character, Peter, who seemed to be there solely to give the viewer something to laugh about. 

Now, with the sophistication of social media, it is easier to encounter feminine men who control the narrative of their own stories, portraying their full humanity. This is a stark contrast to my childhood, when such portrayals were limited to a single, reductive narrative—often as a laughingstock or the stereotypical ‘raging homosexual’ without any sexual restraint, much like the scene in House of Gold, where Peter grabs the dying father’s driver, soliciting sex. 

Growing up, I remember not having anyone to look up to, which made me rely on the internet. While going down a rabbit hole on a picture forum on the Nairaland website, I discovered two feminine men who were often shamed and ridiculed for their femininity. In the trend they featured in, these men were dressed like any other man—low afros, shirts, and jeans, standing side by side—no exaggerated poses, yet they were berated and ridiculed for appearing gay. The ridicule seemed to stem from how femininity in men is viewed as something to be laughed about or as a warning sign of the lusting gay man who needs to be quickly cautioned. While feminine performance by men in media is important for raising conversations on gender, these subversive performances, such as social media skits—especially when the full humanity of the character is discarded—‘always run the risk of becoming deadening clichés through their repetition and, most importantly, through their repetition within commodity culture, where “subversion” carries market value,’ as Judith Butler notes in her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. In this case, the market value is its comedic appeal. It is not that the people in the comment section of these trends haven’t encountered feminine men in their daily lives; they have simply been conditioned to see effeminacy through the narrow media lens of comedy and homosexuality, hence their reaction to two men standing side by side, dressed in masculine clothing, is to laugh and berate them for their femininity. 

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NAVIGATING REPRESENTATION IN MEDIA

In my search for feminine representation, I recently watched Disclosure, a 2020 Netflix documentary on trans visibility in media. Its exploration of how trans people, especially trans women, are portrayed on TV resonated with many of my questions about representation. Spanning years of US media depictions, the documentary highlights the dehumanizing intent often present when trans women are depicted or when men embody femininity. It becomes couched as comedy, as though femininity was a thing to be laughed at, and as Bianca Leigh, one of the cast members, points out, trans people have, in turn, come to develop, ‘a sensitive radar to tell the difference between [when] you are laughing with us, or [when] you are laughing at us.’ 

These two folds of representation and misrepresentation speak to another cast member in the documentary, Laverne Cox, as she details her experience growing up in Mobile, Alabama, and encountering on TV for the first time what it means to be transgender. While she was keen to see such representation on screen, the humorous appeal made her feel disconnected from that experience because it did not truly embody who she was—a church-going, straight-A student who nursed ambitious dreams. This sense of disconnection is exactly how I felt with the feminine representation I saw on TV. It felt as though I was being forced into a box, viewed as a thing to be laughed at, even though nothing about me aligned with that exaggerated performance.  

What these stereotypical effeminate performances stroke in me is a curiosity about power dynamics and how this relationship is revised in other places where gender is performed; for instance, drag. In drag performance lies the answer of intent and who laughs at whom or alongside. Butler argues that, ‘[drag performance] also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence.’ Drag performance is peculiar because we are presented with a subversion of the gender binary system, where what is expressed internally is in ‘dissonance’ with the outward expression, of course, when put in the context of the reinforced gender binary system. Drag performance gives room for people like me, who grew up effeminate, to see ourselves as normal and not as a dissonance of gender identity. What differentiates drag performance from the stereotypical representation of feminine men or men who dress up to play women in media lies in its intent. Both are fundamentally entertainment; drag differs in its performance because it aims to subvert our expectations of gender, not reinforce a stereotype.  

Nowadays, what unsettles me about the representation of feminine men each time I scroll through social media is the stereotype it reinforces. For the effeminate boy or man, femininity in men becomes proportionate to homosexuality, as we see in the character of Peter from House of Gold. Peter’s feminine theatrics are not only exaggerated but portrayed in the manner in which homosexuals are often looked at as people who do not understand sexual boundaries, and whose sole goal is to infiltrate the society with their sexual desire and lust of straight men. Thus, any embodiment that derails from our rigid idea of gender in males becomes a thing to disparage; comedy becomes the tool that masks normative social discomforts. What this does is reduce effeminacy to a bedroom act, hence limiting the conversations we can have for children or teenagers who fail to fit into the rigid end of the gender spectrum. Yet, sexuality and gender are two distinct facets of identity. In a homophobic society like Nigeria, this harmful equation of gender and homosexuality leads to the demonization of effeminate boys and tomboys from a young age, when, in fact, they are simply navigating their gender expressions and possibly their sexualities.  

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AN UNSETTLING PERFOMANCE OF FEMININITY

Effeminate men, tomboys, intersex, non-binary, and trans people subvert the rigid idea of gender and reinforce the argument that gender and gender roles are constructs. In the conventional sense of it, where society problematically considers the male gender superior to the female gender, effeminate men, and trans women, especially, subvert this expectation, and this movement ‘downwards’ is why their humanity is not fully visualized. For the masculine man, it becomes crucial to maintain this hierarchical order; any downward movement is therefore seen as a form of emasculation. As such, one of the ways men seek to perform femininity is to couch their performance in comedy, making the ‘emasculation’ less apparent since it is laughable. Cross-dressing and feminine performance by men become coated in comedic tones. It is, however, condescending in the sense that women are reduced to people without agency and people who solely exist to offer humorous appeal, as we see in recent, post-COVID social media trends. It is almost as though ‘female dresses’ for men function as a primary element in comedy. As though dressing up as a woman is the first step to amusing your audience.  

But that has not always been the case in the Nigerian media space. Area Scatter, the transfeminine entertainer, embodies femininity, and yet in the 2007 short video documentation of their life as a music performer, we witness a portrayal that reflects their full humanity. In the video, Area Scatter is shown carrying their thumb piano as they approach the palace of a royal highness in Southeastern Nigeria. They are not allowed into the room to merely serve as a little clown for their audience; rather, they go into this royal traditional space to fully exist as an entertainer and human that is worth paying attention to and who, in the end, brings their small audience to cheer and smile at their performance. Unlike the Nigerian media space today, where popular effeminate performers are forced to hide under comedy in order to exist, and when they are in turn called into a room, we see that they are there to serve mainly for their comedic appeal. 

These stereotypical gender performances are tied to the power dynamics that reinforce the hierarchical system of traditional gender roles, which oppressively perceive women as inferior. What these performances do is take us back to the idea that women and feminine queer individuals are not people capable of expressing full humanity, and it is especially troubling when men perpetuate this belief through their performance of femininity. As such, we should all be concerned about gender performance, seeking the intent within it.  

And so, I watch TikTok comedies and Instagram reels, where men dress up as women, and usually, my first question is, how important is the dressing to the storyline of the performance? Most times, the answer is in the negative. Take, for instance, a TikTok trend emanating in the Nigerian social media space from the ‘Shoot Beyonce’ series, now the ‘Shoot Tinubu’ series. The video starts, and a man jumps into the scene with a tripod stand. He is wearing a gown and has a dishevelled wig on. When the sound comes on, he points the tripod stand to the camera as though it were a gun, then pulls off his wig and runs away. I scroll down my TikTok feed, and another video comes on. This time around, a different creator wears a pink gown and red wedges, with a black handbag slung over his shoulder. He gestures to the camera and theatrically squats as he points his silver stiletto to it, then runs into his maroon sedan and drives away. The man captions his video: Apologize to your boyfriend or shoot your president. I open the comment section, and the laughing emoji dots every comment, with some referencing the squat. 

When I scroll through the rest of my TikTok feed, I am increasingly unsettled by male performances of femininity. My first instinct is to question if these performances can be done with male clothing on, no wigs, and no handbags, and yet still achieve their comedic value. The interesting thing about scrolling through the ‘Shoot Your President’ TikTok trend is that most of the women who indulge in it all appear as they would on any given day. For the men, their performance ranges from simple donning of female clothing to exaggerated performance of femininity—the badly done makeup, the padded bottoms and breasts, and the exaggerated acting, often involving jumping on heels and all other silly ridiculous theatrics.  

When I think of the growing trend of social media skits featuring male comedians who dress up as women, I think especially of the dehumanization of women and everyone who lives outside the rigid ends of the gender spectrum. Should a line be drawn on these performances? Or should we be increasingly unsettled? These questions are important to me especially as someone who grew up outside the rigid expectation of gender. I am forced to imagine what it would look like if the effeminate characters I encountered as a child did not serve as a humorous appeal to their audience. Would that have lessened the struggles I had with my identity? And maybe if such representation had good intent, people like my sister’s classmates and the peers I grew up with would not have such a rigid idea of gender and would not see me as a taunting ball but rather as a child and classmate

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